Frontend developers: will you recommend using webstrom over vs code? What are the pros and cons?

Webstorm has some cool refactoring capabilities. But apart from that, VSC should be able to meet like 95% of your needs just fine.

I have been using Webstorm for many years now. I have a Jetbrains subscription. The primary reason for me to use WS over VS Code was that Resharper which is made by Jetbrains for Visual Studio has some great features with refactoring, etc. which I was addicted to using when I wrote C# code. I am sure you can get a long way ahead by using free plugins on VS Code. It comes down to a matter of personal choice though. I haven't been able to use VS Code (even though I was an avid VS user) 🙂 Give it a good go for the 30d trial and then decide. Essentially, WS has a lot of cool stuff out of the box which you'd probably need to search and add on VS Code which makes the experience nicer.

Whenever I write frontend code, I use VSCode. I've used jetbrains IDEs in past. They were sluggish, keep indexing forever and would ramp my laptop fans up every single time I switched them on. It was still somewhat useful till I was writing JS because indexing was nice for refactoring. After Typescript, I don't find any major need to use jetbrains. Maybe if you get a lot of merge conflicts? Now I have my environment on a remote machine, so VScode is even more useful with its client server setup. Now that they have fleet coming up, maybe I will try that.

This may be a controversial opinion, but I despise any desktop app that’s built using Java (and equally for Electron as well) . I used Sublime for years before moving to VS Code as Sublime’s development slowed down significantly back in 2015-16 and VS Code became a best Electron app implementation, not to mention a thriving extension ecosystem. I have some hopes about Fleet (built by Jetbrains) which is using a mix of Rust (for performance critical parts) and web technologies (for UI).

@flat-morning-91037 While I would agree most of the time, JetBrains IDEs are one of those rare examples of Java on desktop done wonderfully well.

Well, I'd try to avoid creating editor wars here but if an IDE struggles to index a repo when run in less than 16 GB of RAM, it is better to distance from it. 😉

Fair enough

TL:DR; How much RAM do you have? 16 GB+ => Try out WS < 16 GB => Stick to VS Code?

Also, if you have good muscle memory, Vim/Emacs is fastest alternative.

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on 8 GB of RAM with M1 .. I heavily rely on JetBrains products since my college days (still have an education subscription 😛 ) and usually have Webstorm, Goland, DataGrip and may be 20-30 chrome tabs too. never felt slow.

Also on M1. That’s a whole different beast. Can’t compare with x86 performance.

some colleagues are on emacs entirely but i feel at this point of my career .. switching to emacs/vim for all my dev work reduces my productivity 10x. i’m slowly trying to move though, just because it’s so damn cool to not leave the terminal 😂